Charles Chaney’s VR Mastery

1. Charles Chaney’s VR Mastery • Curriculum for Increasing Verbal Reasoning Scores 1

2. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Symptoms of poor reading comprehension. • Work to diagnose why you have trouble with reading comprehensionin order to be a great reader rather than an amateur reader. • Difficulties emerge when your mind and your eyes are NOT in agreement. • Being a PASSIVE reader instead of an ACTIVE reader can spell disaster on the VR section of the MCAT. 2

3. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Symptoms of poor reading comprehension. • Do you forget what you’ve just read? • Forgetting what you’ve read is the result of a weak memory, distracted mind, or a lack of interest in the material (passive reading). • Memory building activities. • Practice sentence recall. • For 15 to 30 minutes a day, read a sentence, then try to state it word-for-word. • Look back at the sentence and compare. • Then move on to the next sentence. 3

4. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Symptoms of poor reading comprehension. • Memory building activities. • Practice paragraph recall. • For 30 minutes each day, stop after reading a paragraph and then summarize its main ideas. • Look back to catch any ideas that you missed. • Continue to the next paragraph and repeat. 4

5. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Two steps to active reading. • Clear your mind of distractions and focus on the page before you by becoming interested in the material you’re about to read. • Create a curiosity about the material you’ll be reading and ask questions (clutch reading). • What is the author saying here? • Is the author convincing? • What can I learn? • What do I find interesting? • Why was this article published, or what makes it special? • Who would care to read this? 5

6. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Two steps to active reading. • Clear your mind of distractions and focus on the page before you by becoming interested in the material you’re about to read. • Create a curiosity about the material you’ll be reading and ask questions (clutch reading). • What is the author saying here? • Is the author convincing? • What can I learn? • What do I find interesting? • Why was this article published, or what makes it special? • Who would care to read this? 6

7. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Symptoms of poor reading comprehension. • Do your eyes move too slowly? • Untrained readers are tempted to look at each word. • Try to look at every second or third word, instead of every word for the first two weeks of your training. • Aim for reading at 250 words per minute comfortably with full comprehension by the time you take the test. • Use a stopwatch to time yourself when you practice. 7

8. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Symptoms of poor reading comprehension. • Do you daydream? • Disinterest or anxiety or fatigue often lead passive readers into thinking about more exciting things. • Use clutch reading strategies to help you overcome this problem. 8

9. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Symptoms of poor reading comprehension. • Do you lose interest in the material? • You do not have a choice regarding the topics of the VR passages. • Your inability to generate some interest in the material will hamper your efforts to be more active and focused when you read for maximum comprehension. • What “tricks” can you play to force yourself to find passages interesting? • Pretend you’ll be rewarded for your focus. • Engage in positive visualization. • Develop a positive attitude. • Avoid reading leisurely during your training for the test. 9